Eldritch and Cantankerous

A frequent Papers reader, once in training to be a medieval historian, has weighed in on the questions regarding the Templars removing the Shroud of Turin from Constantinople in 1204. I’ll present his comments, with some editorial cleanup, below:

I think the Templars were far to busy dealing with the loss of Jerusalem in 1194 to much about with some wayward Norman looters and their Venetian friends.

Various relics were uncovered during the Crusades (the Holy Lance in Antioch during the 1st Crusade for example), so it is unlikely that something as important as the burial shroud of Christ would be unmentioned in the sources…

It looks like the notion the Shroud was in Constantinople comes not from the primary sources directly, but by inferences drawn from certain comments by Robert of Clari (one of the main sources) about a handkerchief belonging to St. Veronica. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin (see the middle portion starting with the Image of Edessa). I buy the argument that people interpreting this cloth to the the Shroud are wrong; the Byzantines were intermittently gripped by waves of anti-iconography and having something like this around would either A) be a big damn deal and made a big deal of or B) have been destroyed in one of these anti-icon frenzies.

I hate to always play the skeptic, but I can’t take the Turin Shroud seriously, let alone claims like these.

We don’t have anything definitive yet, and I hope that Frale comes forward with a more in-depth explanation soon.

They are confusing the Mandylion, the Image of Edessa, with the Shroud of Turin. They are two distinct and different relics. The Mandylion reappeared in King Louis IX of France’s Sainte Chapelle in Paris several decades later. Admittedly, its whereabouts from 1204 until that time and place are unknown. But it finally disappeared during the French Revolution, and is presumed destroyed.

Margaret Starbird made the same mistake (confusing the Mandylion with the Shroud of Turin) several years ago. This isn’t “news”, it’s “olds”.